Engineering designers often generate multiple concepts to increase novelty and diversity among early solution candidates. Many past studies have focused on creating new concepts "from scratch;" however, designers at every level become fixated on their initial designs and struggle to generate different ideas. In line with prior work on…

This article reflects on 4 years of research activities in the fields of horticulture and creative praxis. The initial project was a personal one and set out with a simple methodology of collecting, observing, and recording a specific genus of plants, that of Mentha. But as the specific question of whether a garden can, or should, be thought of as…

Many of today's educational organizations around the world contend with complex challenges. Yet, longstanding practices and norms in educational systems can hamper educators' abilities to identify and address these challenges, such as only principals leading change efforts or the use of misaligned "quick fixes" for ill-defined…

Transformative learning has been widely discussed in the literature for challenging and reshaping learners' assumptions and beliefs. However, there is a gap in the practical demonstration of how transformative learning can be effectively designed and implemented in real-world contexts. This design-based study fills this gap by designing a mock…

Expanded conceptions of I-Other relationships in critical service learning impact ideas of self, ways in which self is understood to be autonomous and/or relational, and holistic concepts of self and other/s. This manuscript engages core ontological questions in contemporary service learning: Can social epistemological and ontological approaches…

Despite growing global attention to the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals, we have made limited progress towards achieving them. This article describes an emerging Transformative Learning Journey for Sustainability Leadership being developed for professionals at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The purpose is to help participants…

This study explores the integration of key Transformative Learning Theory (TLT) principles into design education to foster Visual Literacy (VL) and promote awareness of environmental issues among undergraduate students. Through thematic analysis of 22 illustrated infographics, ideation sketches and supporting textual data created by art and design…

Due to the advent of technologies and mediascapes, young adults in the Arab region are engaging in new multiliteracies and making meaning through remixing multimodal modes of representations. One such practice is cosplaying. This study explores three Arab cosplayers' designing experiences as an embodied text. The participants' experiences are…

This study examined and categorized the views of undergraduate college students in the Philippines and correlated those with similar patterns of views regarding the use of Design Thinking (DT) in their Philosophy course. The QMethodology was used to analyze qualitative data using PQMethod (Schmolck & Atkinson, 2013) software quantitatively.…

Inequities in opportunities to learn and become in engineering, especially for minoritized youth, are enduring and systemic. How students experience engineering education, through curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher/student interactions, all shape opportunities for identity development. In this paper we draw upon cultural studies and critical…

This article presents a research project that set out to better understand the transformational learning of students working with a real-world client in the design thinking process. The article presents a case study involving a partnership between Grand Valley State University and Founders Brewery to design, develop, market, and distribute a…

The current research explores the transformative potential of Design Thinking (DT) pedagogy in Higher Sustainability Education (HSE) in a hybrid (mix of online and face-to-face) setting. The case study examined a Field Exercise in Sustainability Science (FESS) course, using DT pedagogy, in a HSE program at a university in Japan. The critical…

In this paper we discuss the potential of digital games to create meaningful educational experiences that contribute to the learning of ethics in higher education (HE) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degrees. We describe the design of a new digital ethics game with a focus on the challenges we encountered when applying…

There is growing interest in reenergizing SoTL as a public scholarship that engages civic conversational spaces and debates about our most pressing public issues (Chick, 2019; Friberg, 2020). In the COVID landscape, debates on re- forming higher education -- often foreclosed within our neoliberal university contexts (Giroux, 2014, 2017) --…

Nearly every student today is coming into informal education programs with some form of trauma. This is especially true as we examine the long-lasting impacts of climate change, the pandemic, and identity-based prejudice on children. In response, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has undertaken a transformative journey in its education programs. This…